It’s a powerful image: 18-year-old Emma González, standing resolutely at a podium, teardrops streaming down her face. She wears her hair closely cropped to her head and has small silver ball earrings adorning her ears. Over a white March for Our Lives t-shirt, she wears an olive green bomber jacket emblazoned with iron-on patches and pins displaying slogans such as “I Will Vote” and “We Call BS.” Combined, it makes for a modern, militant look — González is, after all, a general of sorts in the war against gun violence.

Tonight, the streets of Dartmouth’s campus will be uncharacteristically quiet. The throngs of students that normally populate Webster Avenue and Wheelock Street will be absent. Instead, various social spaces will hold public and private conversations on their complicity in and perpetuation of a perennial outrage at the College as well as universities across the country: sexual violence and assault. This reckoning is long overdue and all too necessary. Pledges to curtail and prevent sexual violence must not be confined to the month of April. To have any chance of success, Dartmouth must be sincere and relentless in the reformation of its social spaces.

For decades, the National Rifle Association has advanced a slippery-slope argument. Give an inch on gun policy, the rhetoric goes, and gun control advocates will take a mile. In 1994, then-NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre termed waiting periods on gun purchases “just one more step in the march toward national disarmament.” The NRA similarly denounces most firearm regulation as part of a broader plan to eliminate Second Amendment rights. That argument is both deceptive and untrue. Far from a conspiracy to seize Americans’ guns, sensible gun restrictions are a widely-supported public safety measure.

Something is rotten in the state of American politics. On both left and right, an old idea is making its way back into vogue. On the right, nationalist and quasi-fascistic politics, the old school us-versus-them thinking that once came neatly packaged in black-and-red armbands over Hugo Boss-designed uniforms worn by goose-stepping soldiers, are back. On the left, socialism, Marxism and associated dogmas are coming back, all with talk of empowerment rather than of gulags and concentration camps. But all of this is essentially one idea: collectivism.

Little in life frustrates me — an ever-proud humanities major — more than the science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields. It’s hard to place exactly why that is, but I learned early on in life that the path of the scientist was hardly one that I wanted to follow. Sure, I played the game in high school: I padded my college applications with a myriad of AP and Honors STEM courses in the hopes of coming across as more accomplished and well-rounded to college admissions committees. But being able to succeed in a field and actually enjoying the subject matter are vastly different ideas. It’s safe to say that post-high school, I was elated to be finished with what I considered to be naught but tedious means to an end.

On February 27, the section of Wisconsin Avenue directly in front of the Russian Embassy in Washington was renamed Boris Nemtsov Plaza, in a tribute to its namesake Russian opposition leader. The Associated Press has called the renaming “a D.C. sponsored effort to troll the Russian government.”

Some know Martin Shkreli as the “pharma bro” responsible for gouging the price of the life-saving drug Daraprim, relied on by vulnerable populations — pregnant women, cancer patients, people living with AIDS — by 5,000 percent. Some know him as the man who received a seven-year sentence for securities fraud this March. Some know him as the owner of the sole existing copy of the Wu-Tang Clan album “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.”

Data breaches are not a novelty. They’ve existed ever since humans first started recording data and are an inherent risk of storing information. However, the rise of the digital age has made data breaches much easier to execute. Theoretically, an individual on the opposite side of the world could infiltrate any company’s database, siphon the data of millions of people with some nifty lines of code and sell it, all through a few clicks. Since 2005, there have been over 8,000 data breaches made public, with over ten billion records breached. The recent Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal at first seems like it should be just another unfortunate statistic, but its implications are foreboding for the future of digital privacy.

Homeownership is an essential pillar of the American Dream. Epitomizing security, stability and success, the American home is a safe haven and anchor for many in a volatile world. It certainly was for Dr. Eloisa Tamez, a Lipan Apache who treasured her 250-year-old ancestral home near the Texas-Mexican border. In 2008, the Department of Homeland Security decided that the land was in the way of border wall construction and initiated a messy seven-year legal process against Tamez to expropriate her ancestral land. She fought in the courts, but alas, Homeland Security successfully nationalized her property in 2013. In 2011, Texas farm manager Julia Crawford suffered the same ordeal at the hands of TransCanada, Inc. After she rejected several offers from the oil company, as her family had done for generations, the multi-national corporation took her to court. She crowdfunded her legal defense fund, raising thousands of dollars in a wave of popular support. Regardless, the courts seized the ranch and handed it to TransCanada in service of their Keystone XL Pipeline. This is not justice — this is theft. This ruinous practice of legalized theft is as invasive as it is on the rise. This is eminent domain.

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote poetry as if it were life or death, and for him it was. He was a sickly man who wrote poetry of astounding power, but one of his ideas has particular relevance to life at Dartmouth.

On Saturday, March 24, thousands of people marched on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C. for the March for Our Lives, a demonstration in support of tighter gun control regulations. The march was accompanied by over 800 corresponding protests in cities around the world. Announced in the wake of the tragic mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, the march was the culmination of weeks of activism and outcries mostly by students and youth.

I am an alumnus of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and a resident of Parkland, Florida. This past Valentine’s Day, 14 of my former schoolmates and 3 staff members were senselessly murdered at the hands of a lone gunman. As a result, my hometown and alma mater have been tragically affected in ways that are impossible to describe. I cannot understand what it must have been like for those students to hear gunfire, hide under their desks and witness the deaths of several of their peers. Although I will admit that Marjory Stoneman Douglas is not perfect, I always felt safe there. I made friends, enjoyed my classes, played ice hockey and had a relatively comfortable and normal high school career. The current students at Douglas do not share this experience; their high school career has been brutally tarnished by a terrible act of violence. Our school motto is “Be Positive, Be Passionate, Be Proud To Be An Eagle.” It is in this spirit that I write.

Before writing for The Dartmouth, I was an opinion columnist for The Authored Ascension, my high school’s online-only newspaper. Though I lacked the authority to influence much, I had a clear vision for the paper’s direction. Up until that point, most written pieces were school-specific. News of homecoming events, sports match-ups and the like were the predominant topics for most writers. Few ventured out to tackle national hot-button issues. As a 16-year-old newly equipped with a driver’s license and many opinions, I planned on changing that.

Almost two years ago, a Scottish man named Mark Meechan made and posted a video of his girlfriend’s pug raising its paw in a Nazi salute while he recited hateful and anti-Semitic phrases. Like many, I found his antics offensive.

Dartmouth is more difficult than it used to be, and it isn’t because of the professors or the changing student body. Rather, changes to Dartmouth’s Advanced Placement course acceptance policy that were implemented for the Class of 2018 began to truly manifest themselves last year, as the Class of 2017 graduated and the Class of 2018 stepped into their positions for extracurricular and academic activities.

I’m going to be honest: I didn’t apply to any colleges in the South not due to a dearth of high-caliber institutions, but because of the labels I had heard about the region. The South is often portrayed as ultra-conservative, uber-religious and relatively poor. Even if I were in an urban area and the college campus were a diverse and inclusive place, I feared the implied racism and sexism that might surface if I were to step off campus or venture out of the city. As a West Coast native, I don’t know a lot about Southern culture. For too long, I’ve relied on stereotypes I had heard from others or seen in movies and other media to form an overall negative and foreign image of the region.